Engaging with both typological and contextual approaches, this paper endeavours to take a fresh look at one of the most emblematic groups of Atlantic Late Bronze Age metalwork depositions. Taking a revised typo-chronology for carp's-tongue swords as a starting point, we compare single-piece deposition of these items with their occurrence in hoards of mixed composition. Clear regional trends emerge as a result. We also contrast the composition of carp's-tongue hoards on both sides of the English Channel, highlighting the impact that poorly defined key types can have on our perception of an entire complex of metalwork assemblages. Overall, the composition of carp's-tongue hoards proves rather uniform across this geographical divide. Some noteworthy differences, however, can be discerned between British and French assemblages.

This paper reassesses the early Anglo-Saxon assemblage from Hardown Hill, Dorset. Wingrave excavated the objects in 1916 but apart from his 1931 report, and Evison's 1968 analysis, there has been little subsequent discussion. Despite a lack of human remains, the assemblage has been interpreted as representing an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery – our westernmost burial site by a considerable distance and one that pre-dates the historically attested seventh-century expansion of Wessex. The following typological reclassification and contextual analysis casts serious doubts on a funerary context. Instead, an alternative interpretation is presented that views the assemblage as a useful collection of metalwork, intended to be reforged and recycled, which was presumably deposited for safekeeping and never retrieved. Such a reinterpretation highlights the need for a critical reappraisal of material from older excavations. It also has implications for our understanding of post-Roman Dorset, and for the distribution of fifth- and sixth-century Anglo-Saxon material culture more broadly.

The date of the Romanesque fabric of the abbey church of Lessay (Manche, France) has been much debated by architectural historians. Was the eastern arm of the church completed by the time of the burial of Eudes de Capel in the choir on 3 August 1098? Or do features such as the high rib vault and scalloped capitals preclude a date in the late eleventh century? This paper argues that the choir was completed by 1098, and that the master mason of Lessay was acquainted with architectural developments in north-east England in the 1080s and early 1090s, especially those at York Minster, St Mary's Abbey, York, and allied churches.

The iconography of the Westminster Retable is compared primarily with sources in the Bible moralisée tradition created in France in the thirteenth century. Through analysing the iconography of the miracle scenes displayed on the Retable and relating them to specific copies of the Bible moralisée it is suggested that the artist of the Retable had close personal knowledge of French models. Analysis of the iconography of the central section of the Retable suggests that the text of the Golden Legend may also have been used by the artist and/or the iconographer as a source. It is also suggested that there is an underlying theme in the Retable that relates closely to the creation of the Westminster pavement. Finally, it is suggested that the artist of the Westminster Retable should be integrated into the history of French painting as much as of English painting in order to explore more fully the possibility that he was trained in France.

This note identifies illuminations by the hand responsible for the initial to the French text at the start of the Douce Apocalypse; the artist appears to have worked on commissions linked to Oxford. It is suggested that the internal evidence of the Douce manuscript points to a change of patron in the course of its production after the illustrated Latin text was largely completed, and that it may have been begun for King Henry III and then given to the Lord Edward or Eleanor of Castile, who are shown in the opening initial, before about 1270.

It has hitherto been supposed that, north of the Alps, the elaborate medieval mosaic work known as Cosmatesque was confined to Westminster Abbey. An example with glass tesserae, however, has now come to light from Wimborne Minster, Dorset. This paper explores the circumstances of the rediscovery there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of pieces of ‘rich mosaic’, describes the surviving fragment and compares it in style and function to counterparts in Rome and in the Confessor's Chapel at Westminster. It concludes that it dates, like those at Westminster, to the 1270s or 1280s. It suggests that it adorned the shrine of Wimborne's Saxon founder, St Cuthburga, and that the patron who commissioned it was most likely Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, lord of the nearby manor of Kingston Lacy and close associate of Edward i.

The St Mary Magdalen chest is striking because of its carved facade and has attracted the attention of historians over the last century. There has been debate about its age, culminating in the recent suggestion that it either dates to the fourteenth century or is a later copy. This paper makes a detailed study of all the elements of the chest, constructional and decorative, and compares them with features of related medieval chests in England and Continental north-western Europe. It concludes that the chest has gone through a major reconstruction involving replaced front stiles but that it shares at least four features with chests in north Germany and Sweden dating from around 1320–30 that are not found in English chests, suggesting that it is an imported chest or was made by craftsmen working in that tradition. Numerous areas for future research into the features of English and Continental medieval chests are identified.

Sutton Place, in the county of Surrey, has for many years been misunderstood following an account of the history of the house published in the late nineteenth century. Long believed to be a precocious and little altered building of the early English Renaissance, the house has a very much more complex history than previously supposed. It is shown here that it has been radically altered at least twice, and that its existing symmetrical facade is probably the result of remodelling in the early eighteenth century, incorporating terracotta detail of c 1525–30. Few documents relating to the history of the house survive from before the mid-nineteenth century, and the account given here derives from an examination of the fabric undertaken during repairs and alterations in 1993.

This paper is a continuation of one that appeared in this journal in 2010.1 That earlier paper explored the house built by Lord Henry Howard, first Earl of Northampton, between 1605 and his death in 1614. This one investigates the Suffolk ownership in the years between Howard’s death and 1642, as well as the subsequent acquisition and transformation of the house by Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, between 1642 and 1668. The first period has never been studied with the benefit of archival research and, if architecturally uneventful, offers interesting insights into the political and patrimonial affairs of the time. The second was analysed by Jeremy Wood in 1993 within an essay dealing with the whole of Algernon’s building activity,2 and not therefore in relation to the architectural development of Northumberland House specifically. It is argued here that Northumberland’s work is of crucial importance, as he turned this predominantly urban palace, with its public rooms overlooking the Strand, into a rus in urbe, an aspect that was to be a decisive influence on its many later refurbishments. In addition, investigating Algernon’s work through a close analysis of the primary sources sheds new light on the debate about the development of architecture during the English Civil War.

During research for the Tattershall Castle Conservation Plan for the National Trust, a set of framed drawings of the castle was found in the storeroom of the great tower. Examination of the Curzon correspondence deposited by the National Trust in the Lincolnshire Record Office revealed that these had been commissioned in 1783 by no less a person than Sir Joseph Banks (of nearby Revesby Abbey), President of the Royal Society and Council member of the Society of Antiquaries. With the help of the Sir Joseph Banks Archive Project, and piecing together materials in Aberystwyth, Cambridge, Lincoln, London and New Haven, Connecticut, a story has emerged of antiquarian endeavour in the 1780s when, amidst a frenzy of scientific activity, rampant balloon mania and the care of an ailing turtle, Sir Joseph commissioned the most detailed survey yet undertaken of a medieval monument in the British Isles, entrusting the task to the hitherto unremarked J L Johnson, surveyor and draughtsman, a figure who deserves belated recognition and a place in the history of medieval archaeology for his pioneering efforts.

A digital survey, combining photogrammetry and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI), offers significant new insights into the British Museum's Easter Island statue called Hoa Hakananai'a. These include the likelihood that it was made with a tapering base to stand in the ground, as seen by the crew of HMS Topaze in 1868, and that a nearby stone described a century ago was a pukau, a stone ‘hat’. Petroglyphs consisting of two komari (stylised female genitalia) were subsequently added. Succeeding these were bas-relief carvings, here interpreted as a single composition that narrates the island's birdman myth as recorded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This reading is supported by photographs of Hoa Hakananai'a taken in Chile in 1868. A new model is presented for the relationship between the statue and the birdman cult. As it now stands, in a nineteenth-century plinth, Hoa Hakananai'a appears to lean slightly from its intended placing.

Alan Sorrell is best known today as a ‘reconstruction artist’, employed between the 1930s and the 1970s by the Ministry of Works and other bodies to produce reconstructions of ancient monuments and re-creations of ancient life. The archive containing many of his papers, working drawings, correspondence and other material was temporarily loaned to the Society of Antiquaries of London for study in 2010–11, and is now publicly accessible via the Sorrell family. This paper reports on initial research into the Sorrell archive and other documentary sources, funded through a British Academy Small Grant. We discuss how the archive throws new light not just on Sorrell's career and achievements, but on the intellectual and professional development of archaeology as a whole in the mid-twentieth century.